Friday, April 29, 2016

Bob McDonnell, former
governor of Virginia, may end up beating the rap for all those gifts he got while
in office from a snake oil salesman seeking help from the state government.
Judging from Supreme Court arguments earlier this week [April 26], five or six
of the justices seem ready to agree with McDonnell’s attorney and his many
supporters that McDonnell’s public corruption conviction threatens the very nature
of representative government in 21st century United States.

A ruling for McDonnell
seems unlikely to revive the political fortunes of the one-time rising
Republican star. But a broadly written decision to throw out the convictions
will hamper future public corruption prosecutions and make the practice of “pay
for play” all the more common than it already is: mostly legal if done with a
wink and a nod.

A federal court jury of
McDonnell’s peers (or perhaps his betters) convicted the former Republican
chief executive of eleven counts of fraud in September 2014 after 17 hours of
deliberation following a six-week trial. Ever since the scandal was first aired
in the news media and then in court, McDonnell has stoutly maintained his
innocence.

McDonnell insists that he
never really did anything for the gift-giving diet supplement executive Johnnie
Williams except meet with him, host events, and arrange meetings. The jury was
not buying it, but McDonnell’s appellate attorney Noel Francisco made more
headway with the argument at the Supreme Court.

Francisco urged the
justices to rule that for a public official to engage in an “official act” under
federal anti-corruption statutes the official “must either make an official
decision or urge someone else to do so.” The line, Francisco said, is between “access
to the decision-makers”  apparently OK  “and trying to
influence those decisions.” Despite setting up the meetings, McDonnell never
actually urged state regulators or university researchers to help Williams market
or prove the efficacy of his Star Scientific diet supplement Anatabloc.

The justices probed
Francisco’s arguments, but more politely than customary for a bench that
remains very hot even after the volatile Antonin Scalia’s death. When the government’s
lawyer Michael Dreeben took the lectern, however, he encountered tough
questions quickly  first from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and
then the other two justices at the court’s ideological center, Anthony M. Kennedy
and Stephen G. Breyer.

Silent during Francisco’s
argument, Roberts began by quoting what he called an “extraordinary” amicus
brief filed on behalf of White House counsels for the five past presidents.
They all warned, Roberts said, that upholding McDonnell’s conviction would
“cripple the ability of elected officials to fulfill their role in our
representative democracy.”

Breyer too worried about
public officials unclear about where to draw legal lines and about executive
branch prosecutors with “dangerous” powers to go after legislators. “My problem
is the criminal law as the weapon of choice,” he said.

The gifts that Williams
lavished on McDonnell and his now estranged wife came to $175,000 in all,
according to the government’s estimate. They are too numerous and too petty to
mention all in a column, but among them a personally inscribed Rolex watch,
golf equipment, golf outings, a vacation, and an outright undocumented
five-figure loan. The justices, however, came up with hypotheticals that reduced
the legal issue to trifles: an afternoon of trout fishing, Roberts suggested,
or from Breyer a bottle of expensive French wine.

Dreeben, a deputy solicitor
general with 27 years in the office, did his best to answer the justices’
concerns in what was his milestone 100th argument before the court.
Legalizing this kind of quid for public officials is a
“recipe for corruption” and would send a “terrible message for citizens,”
Dreeben said. But where’s the quo, Roberts asked. Dreeben
stood his ground. Helping arrange “a preferential opportunity” that other
citizens do not have is “official action,” he answered.

When Francisco returned for
rebuttal, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put Dreeben’s argument to him, but
Francisco similarly stood his ground. No crime, Francisco answered, if the
official did not actually try to influence the outcome. Earlier, Justice Sonia
Sotomayor had similarly challenged Francisco by suggesting that state officials
certainly might have thought McDonnell was trying to influence them.

To Breyer’s concern,
Dreeben pointed to the pride of the U.S. criminal justice system: the
jury. “There is a very critical protection here,” Dreeben said. “It’s the
requirement of showing something beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury.” Kennedy
was unmoved. “You’re going to tell the senators, the officials with the
lunches, don’t worry,” Kennedy said, mockingly. “The jury has to be convinced
beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’s tough.”

Anti-corruption prosecutors
and good-government types confront the stark reality that money is more and
more the mother’s milk not only of politics but also of governance. And political
practitioners are too clever to be constrained by straightforward quid
pro quo bribery laws.

Neither of the statutes
used in the McDonnell indictment is a bribery statute as such. The Hobbs Act,
aimed at labor unions when enacted in 1946, prohibits obtaining money “under
color of official right.” The “honest services fraud” statute, enacted in 1988,
prohibits depriving someone (think: constituents) of “the intangible value of
honest services.” A jury found McDonnell guilty of conspiring to do both.
Oddly, a majority of the justices seem ready to narrow those laws to hold
public officials not to the highest but to a lower standard.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

In years to come, Gavin
Grimm may be remembered just as Rosa Parks is today for a seemingly simple act
of self-assertion that helped bring the country closer to the Pledge of
Allegiance ideal of liberty and justice for all.

Parks’ refusal to yield her seat on a
Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 helped spark the boycott of the city’s racially
segregated bus system and in time repeal of the ordinance forcing black bus
riders to the back. Gavin, a teen-aged transgender boy in Gloucester
County in southeastern Virginia, wanted merely
to use the boys’ restroom at his school and went to court to establish his
right to use the restroom that corresponds to his gender identity instead of
his biological sex.

The Rosa Parks story is
part myth: she was not the quiet, unassuming seamstress as often depicted but
in fact the secretary of the local NAACP and an activist trained in civil
disobedience. Gavin, on the other hand, appears to be nothing more than a
somewhat shy, video game-playing teenager who wants to get about his school
work without a lot of fuss. Today, however, he has become a national poster boy
for transgender rights who says he hopes his legal fight “will help other kids
avoid discriminatory treatment at school.”

Gavin might have been spared
his legal troubles but for the overwrought reaction of townsfolk in rural Gloucester County. Gavin, who was born female, came
out to his mother as transgender in his freshman year and with his mother went
to the Gloucester
High School principal
with the information at the start of his sophomore year in fall 2014. By then,
he was taking hormone therapy, and he changed his name legally later that year.

The school administration
was “supportive,” according to the account in the appeals court decision
in Gavin’s favor last week [April 19]. School officials “took steps to ensure
that he would be treated as a boy by teachers and staff” and then, at Gavin’s
request, allowed him to use the boys’ restroom. Gavin used the boys’ restroom
for seven weeks “without incident,” according to the court, but the word that
got out “excited the interest of others in the community.”

The Gloucester School Board
would have none of it even with Gavin and his mother in the audience at two
meetings, in November and December. The meetings were sellouts: 27 people spoke
at the first, 37 at the second, most of them at both in favor of the proposed
policy segregating restrooms and locker facilities by birth sex instead of
gender identity. As the court recites, speakers called Gavin a “young lady,”
and one called him a “freak.”

The board approved the
policy by a 6-1 vote; the school responded by allowing Gavin to use a separate,
single-user restroom. But, as Gavin related at trial, “Being required to use
the separate restrooms sets him apart from his peers, and serves as a daily
reminder that the school views him as ‘different.’” Represented by American
Civil Liberties Union lawyer Joshua Block, Gavin sued the school in June 2015,
claiming that the policy violated the federal law known as Title IX that
prohibits sex discrimination in public schools.

The trial before senior
federal judge Robert Doumar, a Reagan appointee now in his mid-80s, did not go
well for Gavin. Doumar was unsympathetic on the facts and unconvinced on the
law. Doumar characterized gender dysphoria as a “mental disorder” and resisted
arguments from Block that it becomes a disorder only if untreated. With no
medical training, Doumar doubted Gavin’s testimony that he had developed
urinary infections from “holding it in” while at school.

As for the law, Doumar held
that “sex” under Title IX refers only to biological sex, not to gender
identity. He discounted the legal opinion from the Department of Education’s
Office of Civil Rights in January 2015 requiring schools to treat transgender
students “consistent with their gender identity.”

In a split decision, a
three-judge panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Doumar was
wrong on the law and sent the case back to him to reconsider Gavin’s request
for an injunction allowing him to use the boys’ restroom as before. Doumar had
reasoned that the harm to others outweighed any harm to Gavin. As Judge Henry
Floyd wrote for the majority, the school board offered no evidence that Gavin’s
use of the boys’ restroom was a safety issue.

By remarkable coincidence,
Floyd also wrote for a three-judge panel in 2014 in invalidating Virginia’s ban
on same-sex marriages and the dissenting judge, Paul Niemeyer, dissented again
in Gavin’s case. Like Doumar, Niemeyer simply denies transgenderism: boys are
boys, girls are girls, end. With that view, Niemeyer viewed Title IX’s use of
“sex” as “unambiguous” in referring to biological sex.

On that point, law nerds
will note that the case turns on what is called Auer
deference after a 1997 Supreme Court decision. The ruling requires courts
generally to defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations. Back
before Doumar  the appeals court declined to reassign the case 
Gavin still faces a judicial minefield. But in an essay
for Time, Gavin says the case has helped start a needed
conversation. Some of his schoolmates opened up, he wrote, once they were
exposed to the conversation. “And that,” he concludes, “is extremely, extremely
important.”

Sunday, April 17, 2016

In baseball, the tie goes to the runner. At the Supreme Court, a tie goes to the lower court. Thus, when eight justices are evenly divided, the Court’s decision reads in its entirety, “The judgment is affirmed by an evenly divided Court.” So far this term, Justice Antonin Scalia’s death has resulted in two 4-4 decisions. Conservatives won a minor victory in one that narrowed the federal credit discrimination law. But liberals scored the bigger win in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association by rescuing from a likely overruling a 40-year-old precedent vital to the financial security of public employee unions. The justices’ individual votes are not announced in such cases, but the justices likely divided in each along the usual conservative-liberal lines. More deadlocks seem likely despite what Justice Elena Kagan has described as Chief Justice John Roberts’ efforts to avoid them. Conservatives are poised to prevail if tie votes emerge in two remaining big cases, both decided by the predominantly conservative federal appeals court for the Fifth Circuit. The justices appeared equally divided in arguments last month on a Texas law, upheld by the appeals court, that could force most of the state’s abortion clinics to close. And they may well be equally divided in arguments on Monday [April 18] as the Obama administration seeks to overturn the Fifth Circuit’s decision blocking the president’s policy of “deferred action” on an estimated 4 million undocumented migrants. Scalia’s death in February has deprived the court’s conservative bloc of the needed fifth vote to overcome a united bloc of four liberal justices. But the court’s decisions already announced in cases argued before Scalia’s death show that the Roberts Court, even with Scalia’s votes, was turning its back on some of the biggest items on conservative groups’ wish-lists. In a major setback for Republicans and conservatives, the court earlier this month rejected an effort to upset the established practice of using total population as the basis for applying the “one person, one vote” rule in redistricting cases. Republicans and conservative groups had invested time, money, and effort in a suit seeking to count eligible voters instead of total population in drawing equal-population districts. The proposed change was widely seen as likely to benefit Republicans by reducing representation in traditionally Democratic urban areas with significant numbers of noncitizens and children. All eight of the justices rejected the Texas voters’ argument to require eligible-voter population as the only basis for equalizing districts. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinion for six of the justices in Evenwel v. Abbott cast doubt on using voter population at all, but two conservatives  Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.  suggested state and local government should have that as an option. Scalia’s vote in the case, argued in December, is undisclosed, but he was oddly silent during the arguments  suggesting perhaps that he recognized the plaintiffs’ argument as a nonstarter. In any event, Roberts and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave the liberal bloc two votes for throwing cold water on the proposed change. Roberts and Kennedy similarly sided with the four liberals in an important class action case decided in March. The 6-2 decision in Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo upheld a $2.9 million award against Tyson for failing to pay meat plant workers overtime for the time spent in “donning and doffing” protective gear required for their jobs. Plaintiffs used a statistical study to estimate the “average” time required, but the company  backed by major business groups  wanted a flat rule against the use of so-called “representative evidence.” Kennedy rejected the argument. “A categorical exclusion . . . would make little sense,” he wrote. Thomas and Alito dissented. Scalia’s vote in the case, argued in November, is again undisclosed, but given his hawkish stance against class actions in previous cases he likely joined the other two conservatives in dissent. Kennedy also gave the liberal bloc a crucial vote in an earlier effort to make class actions more difficult for plaintiffs. In Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, the court in December blocked business defendants from thwarting potential class actions by offering the named plaintiff the full amount of his or her claimed damages. Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion; Thomas concurred in the judgment. Scalia was one of three dissenters, along with Roberts and Alito. The two most closely divided criminal law decisions of the term so far also ended with liberal rulings. In Montgomery v. Louisiana, the court decided that its earlier decision barring mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile murderers applies retroactively. Scalia was one of three dissenters in the new decision, issued in January. This month, the court in Luis v. United States blocked the government from freezing a defendant’s legitimate assets if needed to pay his or her lawyer. The lineup in the 5-3 decision crossed usual ideological lines: Kennedy, Alito, and Kagan were the dissenters. Scalia’s vote is again undisclosed. The fragmentation of the conservative bloc underscores Senate Republicans’ stakes in blocking President Obama’s nomination of federal judge Merrick Garland as Scalia’s successor. In an earlier era, Garland could have won unanimous confirmation  as Kennedy did in 1988. But today’s Republicans are interested in confrontation, not consensus, with no regard for the effect on the court or its reputation.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

It’s not enough that partisan Republicans are denouncing President Obama for trampling on the Constitution by, for example, exercising discretion on enforcing federal immigration laws. Now, a conservative website is suggesting with no evidence whatsoever that the White House may be behind the widely criticized suggestion that the president could install federal judge Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court without any action by the Senate.
Gregory Diskant, a partner with the Wall Street law firm Patterson Belknap Webb and Tyler, put forth the idea in an op-ed published last week [April 8] in The Washington Post. The op-ed apparently was “the most [un]popular” article on the Post’s website over the weekend, producing “thousands of outraged comments,” according to LawNewz columnist Rachel Stockman.
The conservative web site Breitbart followed with an equally critical story the next day [April 11], but reporter Ken Klukowski added the suggestion that Diskant might have been acting in concert with the White House. “[T]here is a serious possibility,” Klukowski wrote, “that he is floating a trial balloon for the White House, gauging the public’s willingness to accept such a fundamental change in the Constitution’s separation of powers and system of checks and balances.”
Not since Shakespeare has there been more ado about so little. Diskant appears to be only the second person  count ’em, two  to raise in print the possibility of a unilateral presidential appointment to the Supreme Court. Richard Primus, a University of Michigan law professor, first broached the idea in an article in Politico [March 29]. “You could argue” that the president could bypass the Senate that way, Primus wrote. But a columnist for the Detroit News wrote later [April 13] that Primus “doubts” that Obama would do so.
Ironically, Obama could have installed Garland on the Supreme Court in February by exercising his undoubted power to fill the vacancy while the Senate was in recess. Garland could have taken his seat and helped avert any 4-4 ties in the cases to be argued in February, March, and April. But Obama chose not to act even though Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had already announced the plan to deny a hearing for whomever Obama might nominate.
President Dwight Eisenhower twice used the recess appointment power to fill Supreme Court vacancies: Earl Warren in 1953 and William J. Brennan Jr. in 1956. The recess appointments were uncontroversial, and both Warren and Brennan went on to win Senate confirmation for full terms by voice votes.
That was then, this is now. In his article, Diskant aptly suggested that the Senate Republicans’ refusal to consider Garland’s nomination is evidence of a “broken” system. He then went one step further to argue that Obama could treat the Senate’s failure to act a waiver of its “advice and consent” power under the Constitution and proceed to exercise his power to “appoint” Garland on his own.
From available evidence, Diskant appears to have offered his suggestion of a unilateral presidential appointment for himself and no one else. He was identified as a member of the national board of the citizens’ advocacy group Common Cause, but the group’s position is to urge the Senate to follow normal procedure and old a hearing on Garland’s nomination.
Diskant also identified himself as law clerk to the late justice Thurgood Marshall in the 1975 term, but he cited nothing in Marshall’s writings or any other Supreme Court opinion as authority for his view. He also claimed that there are historical precedents for such a unilateral presidential appointment, but cited no specific example.
In his article, Primus imagined the possibility of a unilateral presidential appointment only if the impasse continued into the term of the next president. “At some point,” Primus wrote, “someone in the White House counsel’s office will notice that the Constitution doesn’t actually say that the Senate needs to vote to confirm a judicial nominee.” Primus was law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but he too cited no Supreme Court authority for his suggestion.
Diskant’s op-ed carried this headline in the online version: “Obama can appoint Merrick Garland to Supreme Court if the Senate does nothing.” Three days later, the Post’s website carried a reply by Case Western Reserve law professor Jonathan Adler under the headline, “No, President Obama CANNOT appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court if the Senate does nothing.”
Adler noted that Diskant’s suggestion had been criticized from the right by National Review commentator Ed Whelan (“gobsmacking stupidity”) and from the left by Center for American Progress legal affairs writer Ian Millhiser (“dumb”). Diskant’s argument, Adler concluded, “is extremely hard to take seriously.”
Even so, Garrett Epps, columnist for TheAtlantic.com, took the proposal seriously enough to treat it in a critical column [April 14] and attribute the idea to “a handful of [unnamed] progressives.” Epps, a friend, college classmate, and respected Supreme Court expert, thus feeds the suggestion that mischief may well be afoot.
For better or worse, there is not. As far as the public record shows, the only people espousing the “progressive argument” for what Epps calls “confirmation by proclamation” are one law professor and one New York lawyer, neither with any evident ties to the White House. Whatever Republicans may think Obama has done to exceed his constitutional powers, there appears to no plans for a presidential putsch at the Supreme Court. Time to take a breath and relax.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Chief Justice John Roberts closed his dissent in the marriage equality case by assuring same-sex couples that they were free to celebrate their victory. “But do not celebrate the Constitution,” Roberts added sternly. “It had nothing to do with it.” To the contrary, according to Georgetown law professor David Cole in his new book Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law. “The Constitution had everything to do with it,” Cole says of the court’s 5-4 decision last June. [Disclosure: Cole is a personal friend and Georgetown faculty colleague.] As Cole suggests in the subtitle, however, the credit or discredit for the landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges goes not to the justices on the Supreme Court, but to engaged citizen activists who “made” constitutional law through a combination of intellectual discourse and strategic political and legal advocacy. “The bulk of constitutionalism actually takes place outside the [Supreme] Court,” he writes. The gay marriage decision is the most recent and most dramatic example of citizen-made constitutional law in Cole’s telling, but not the only one. The label applies equally to the gun-rights decision in Heller v. District of Columbia that Roberts joined seven years earlier. The late justice Antonin Scalia debunked the idea of a “living Constitution,” the slogan popularized by among others the great liberal justice of an earlier era William J. Brennan Jr. Scalia took puckish delight in startling listeners or readers by describing the nation’s founding charter as a “dead Constitution”  its meaning today fixed by its original meaning when written. Cole takes Brennan one step further by saying that it is not a “living” Constitution but a “lived Constitution” – its meaning changed by words and deeds of those who use its text to expand liberty in ways unforeseen when written. Cole, a committed liberal, may surprise some or even most of his readers by linking the gay marriage and gun rights rulings. Liberals hailed the first and denounced the other with the same fervor conservatives brought to attacking the first and celebrating the other. The libertarian Cato Institute was the only legal advocacy group to back the winning side in each at the Supreme Court. Introduced at a Georgetown Law School event last week [April 7] as a “public intellectual,” Cole finds in each of the two cases the power of an idea to turn the unthinkable into the inevitable. For gay marriage, the seminal writing is Evan Wolfson’s 141-page research paper completed in 1983 as a 3L at Harvard Law School proposing a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. For gun rights, the seminal writings are a half dozen law review articles written by Stephen Halbrook in the 1980s seeking to find an individual right to “keep and bear arms” in the Second Amendment despite that militia clause at the beginning. Wolfson’s idea was so preposterous that he had found no constitutional law professor to sponsor his paper, only an expert on wills and trusts. Halbrook found law journal editors willing to take his articles  tellingly, the George Mason Law Review was the first  but Cole notes that no less an authority than the former chief justice Warren E. Burger denounced the individual rights view of the Second Amendment in 1991 as “a fraud.” If either of those ideas had been squarely presented to the Supreme Court in the 1980s or 1990s, Wolfson or Halbrook would have been lucky to get two votes or even one. But instead gay marriage and gun rights advocates were working to build support and move forward step by step, state by state  strategies of “patient incrementalism,” in Cole’s phrasing  even as there were internal divisions within each of the movements on how best to proceed. For gay marriage, same-sex couples in Hawaii forced the issue despite opposition from national organizations. The result was a national backlash emblemized by the Defense of Marriage Act and overcome only by the slow succession of victories beginning in the late 1990s. Gun rights supporters experienced no comparable nationwide backlash as they made slow gains with enactment of “shall carry” laws in state legislatures. As the endgames neared, national organizations were wary of taking their cases to the Supreme Court. The National Rifle Association was not ready for Heller to go to the justices. Gay rights organizations were livid when the dream team of Theodore Olson and David Boies took the California Proposition 8 case to the court in 2012. In the end, each of the two movements won 5-4 decisions establishing rights that Cole aptly says are “not self-evidently supported by the Constitution.” Today, he expects neither decision to be overruled even as opponents call for that to happen. Despite those attacks, both decisions now command popular support as measured by public opinion polls. “The Supreme Court doesn’t change constitutional law so much as it recognizes that constitutional law has changed,” Cole remarked at the law school event. Scalia, one imagines, is turning over in his grave. He viewed anything other than originalism and strict textualism as anti-democratic, a usurpation of political power by unelected, unaccountable judges. To the contrary, Cole says. Constitutional law, as actually lived, is “more democratic than commonly understood.” We the People rewrite the Constitution generation by generation through words and deeds – and thus, one can add, it endures.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

When the Supreme Court
struck down racial segregation in public schools in 1954, the Virginia
legislature responded by requiring the state to close any schools ordered by a
federal court to desegregate. When the court applied the same rule to parks and
recreational facilities, many local communities, including my home town of Nashville, Tennessee,
responded similarly by closing public swimming pools.

The North Carolina legislature has now tried a
similar tack to deflect moves toward legal equality for the state’s LGBT
citizens. When the city of Charlotte adopted an
ordinance prohibiting discrimination in employment or public accommodations on
the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, the state’s lawmakers responded
with a law nullifying the ordinance and blocking any other municipalities from
following Charlotte’s
example.

In effect, North Carolina
closed the local political process to advocates for LGBT equality by adopting a
policy that discrimination in employment and public accommodations was “a
matter of statewide general concern” outside the authority of any local
government to regulate. The Republican-controlled legislature met in a
specially convened session to consider the bill and approved it in both
chambers on a single day [March 23]. The state’s Republican governor, Pat
McCrory, signed the bill late the same evening.

Even as the bill was moving
along this extremely fast track, opponents were suggesting that it was plainly
unconstitutional under a Supreme Court decision in 1996 striking down an
anti-gay ballot measure. The voter-approved constitutional amendment at issue
in Romer v. Evans would have prevented the state or any
local government from enacting a law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation.

In a 6-3 decision authored
by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court said that the amendment disqualified
an identifiable class of persons from seeking legal protection against
arbitrary discrimination. The amendment, Kennedy concluded, was “a denial of
equal protection in the most literal sense.”

Unlike the Colorado
measure, the North Carolina
law,
known by its bill number HB2, lacks explicit evidence of singling out LGBT
individuals. The law instead declares a state policy of preventing
discrimination in employment or public accommodations “because of race,
religion, color, national origin, or biological sex” and finds benefits to
businesses and organizations from “consistent” statewide laws in the area.

The bill rode to quick
passage in part on the strength of the issue of bathroom privacy raised by the
growing visibility of transgender individuals. The bill effectively requires
most transgender individuals to use single-sex bathrooms for their “biological
sex,” as shown on their birth certificate, instead of their gender identity.
Legislators sought to obscure their animus somewhat by specifying that local
boards of education have authority to provide single-user unisex facilities.

LGBT rights organizations 
the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and Equality North Carolina 
filed a federal court suit challenging the constitutionality of the measure less
than a week after enactment [March 28]. The lead plaintiff in Carcaňo
v. McCrory is a transgender male employee of the University of North
Carolina whose therapist recommended he use men’s restrooms but would be
required to women’s facilities under the law.

The 45-page complaint notes the history that preceded the state law. The Charlotte city council passed the ordinance
prohibiting anti-LGBT discrimination by a 7-4 vote on Feb. 22 after two
hearings featuring testimony from LGBT citizens about their experiences with
invidious discrimination. The state legislature passed its law nullifying the Charlotte ordinance,
according to the complaint, after “openly and virulently attacking transgender
people, who were falsely portrayed as dangerous and predatory to others.”

The complaint includes no
legal citations, but the Supreme Court precedents were sufficiently clear to
the state’s attorney general, Democrat Roy Cooper, that he promptly declined to
defend the law in court. McCrory, however, is doubling down in defense of the
measure. After the suit was filed, he issued a “fact sheet” filled with misinformation
about the law’s effects.

McCrory denied that the law
took away any existing legal protections against discrimination. As noted by
fact checkers for the Raleigh television station
WRAL, the state law appears to override not only the Charlotte
ordinance but also narrower measures in Greensboro
and Raleigh,
the state capital. In his fact sheet, McCrory depicted the law as beneficial to
North Carolina’s
ability to attract businesses. The fact-checkers noted opposition to the bill
from, among other private corporations, American Airlines, which uses the Charlotte airport as a
hub.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s,
Atlanta sought
to distinguish itself from the resistance to desegregation by describing itself
as “the city too busy to hate.” Charlotte has
the same aspirations that Atlanta
had back then to become a truly national city instead of a big regional city.
Among the council members voting for the ordinance, Democrat Al Austin harked
back to Atlanta’s
slogan. “Are we a city that panders to fear and hate to those who wish to
perpetuate fear and injustice?” he asked, according to the account in
The Charlotte Observer. “I say to you, ‘Not on my watch.’”

Back in the 1960s, North Carolina had a
reputation for progressive politics and policies. Today, under a Republican
governor and GOP-controlled legislature, the state has turned its back on that
tradition and found time to authorize anti-LGBT discrimination in state law.
But federal courts may step in at least to correct this misstep.

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About this Blogger

Kenneth Jost is author of Supreme Court Yearbook and Supreme Court From A to Z (both CQ Press) and Trending Toward #Justice. He graduated from Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, where he is an adjunct professor. He is a contributing writer with CQ Researcher and was a member of the CQ Researcher team that won the 2002 American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award. His articles have appeared in national and legal publications; he also appears as an analyst on national and local radio and television news programs.

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